I spent a good part of last night helping my nephew build one of the two Bionicles that he got for Christmas. The one that we were working on was a smaller, $12.99 one from Big Lots. The other, however, is a 800-plus piece set that cost around $80 and is taking up most of my mother's dining room table. The set is actually cheap compared to some of the Star Wars Lego sets that I saw while Christmas shopping, sets that were gone yesterday when we went back to Wally World to spend Chandler's gift cards. Thus, somebody somewhere is spending a lot of money on those things.
Now when I was a kid, way back when we had to walk barefoot in the snow to school--okay, I'm not that old--we didn't have fancy Lego sets. You couldn't build a Star Wars battleship, Spongebob's house, or a league of battling Bionicles. Basically, you got a bunch of rectangle, rainbow-colored Legos in a box or, if you were really special, in a big tub like Lincoln Logs. All you could really build out of those Legos was a house--a square one with windows, not one shaped like a pineapple. Now that Legos have balls, joints, and moving parts, you can build almost anything. I wouldn't be surprised if they now have Lego conventions and Lego build-offs or even a real house made out of Legos somewhere in the world. While I don't know that I would ever want to sleep on a bed of Legos or use a toilet made from one, this whole Lego revolution makes me wish that I was the one who had invented those little square blocks in the first place.
